A Daily News – It’s safer to walk streets of Watts

By Beth Barrett, Staff Writer Article Last Updated: 01/13/2008 02:23:47 AM PST

WATTS – An early-evening chill Thursday didn’t stop dozens of children from playing and adults from strolling about the long-troubled and gang-infested Jordan Downs housing project.

The neighborly scene was a sharp contrast to just two years ago when – even on balmy summer nights – the area was a virtual ghost town except for armed Grape Street Crips gang members, lined up sometimes 30 deep on street corners, hawking drugs.

“They were out of control in here, selling dope and drinking,” South Bureau gang officer Dario Machado said. “About two years ago, we started hitting them hard on injunction violations. It went from gangsters all over the place to kids running around and playing … normal kids playing soccer or riding their bikes.”

After decades barricaded behind barred windows in the beige units within the fortress-like Jordan Downs, many of its 3,500 residents say they are starting to open their doors to a life increasingly free of the gang violence that has long put Watts at ground zero for gang killings and the heart of Los Angeles’ murder epidemic.

“They (the children) can go out at night, they play outside at night – not late at night. But they get to do a lot of stuff … like sports, and they go on trips,” Tracy Coleman said as three of her young children played around her one afternoon in late December.

“The community leaders are what really did it, and the Watts Gang Task Force. It was the community getting together.”

The newly emerging life comes two years after the Los Angeles Police Department slapped a gang injunction on the project’s Grape Street Crips, and four years after one was placed on the Bounty Hunters from the nearby Nickerson Gardens housing project.

In Watts, homicides dropped from 24 in 2006 to just 11 last year – including a three-month stretch without a single slaying. Gang homicides for the approximately 1-square-mile home to an estimated 2,000 gangsters dropped from 13 in 2006 to eight last year.

In Jordan Downs alone, there was only one homicide last year compared with the usual three to five in previous years.

In the larger South Bureau – a 60-square-mile swath with 717,000 residents, including approximately 35,000 in Watts – homicides dropped from 198 in 2006 to 150 last year.

Gang-related killings within the bureau’s boundaries – where about 22,000 of the city’s 39,000 gang members live – accounted for 125 of the 2006 homicides and 93 of last year’s.

It is those numbers that lie at the heart of last week’s announcement by LAPD Chief William Bratton that homicides citywide dropped to a 40-year low of 392 last year.

And it is stirring the biggest debate in years about whether unprecedented cooperation among community leaders, police, prosecutors, gang intervention workers, academics and politicians has begun to reap dividends.

“It’s still a high-crime area, and there’s a lot of work left to do, but my take is, we’re headed in the right direction,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck, commanding officer for Operations-South Bureau.

Beck contrasted how Jordan Downs residents reacted to a December officer-involved shooting compared with previous mob scenes in which crowds often would hurl rocks, bottles and invectives at cops.

“There were no trays of cookies coming out, but they were fine,” Beck said. “I’ve been in those same developments where we literally had to back